


The Wrath of Heaven

by hawkwing_lb



Series: out of the silence and the shade [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 19:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5598355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hawkwing_lb/pseuds/hawkwing_lb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara Lavellan woke hurting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One: where no wounds were

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, I didn't mean to set out to rewrite the prologue of DA:I from the point of view of a Dalish warrior with a Traumatic Backstory. It just, well, _happened_. Several thousand words later, here we are...

Kara Lavellan woke hurting.

Not the first time she'd woken with her body bearing evidence of injuries she didn't remember receiving. Maybe the third, counting what happened that terrible winter in Parivantium. She lay still on -- a straw pallet, she thought, and beneath it the dank chill of stone -- and took stock. Her head, dulled and a little sore. A shivery ache in her muscles, like the aftermath of fever. Her belly cramped and hollow: she'd been a day at least without eating, then, likely more. Mouth dry, but not so dry that all she could think of was thirst. More definite pain in her ribs -- bruises, most likely, maybe from a beating. Probably a beating: cold metal restrained her wrists, and a sharp pain like broken bones twisted her left hand.

 _Don't open your eyes._ She wasn't alone. Stone gave back echoes: shifting fabric, the clink of mail, two sets of breathing. Distantly, very distantly, the sound of shouting. She was a prisoner. Best to lie still, best to remember what she'd done to _end up_ a prisoner, before anyone realised she was awake.

What _did_ she remember?

A week across the Waking Sea from Ostwick to Highever, in the hold of a ship set to heaving by the last storms of winter. Three weeks hiking through the mud of Ferelden, with her hat pulled low to hide her ears: Keeper Istimaethoriel wanted first-hand news from the Conclave called by the humans' White Divine at her holy town of Haven, but this wasn't the Free Marches where clan Lavellan had friends in half a dozen reputable mercenary companies and Kara could carry her weapons openly with minimal risk, as long as she carried the right letters, too. She hadn't liked the risk in the Frostbacks, on cold roads thronging with human pilgrims, human dignitaries, and hard-eyed templars and mages who'd already seen enough of war to have the _strike first, question later_ instinct worn in to the bone. She hadn't liked it, but she'd taken it, because not carrying weapons was the worse risk.

Haven. A dirty little town with new construction thrown up hastily for the Conclave in green wood and like to rot within five years. A stone chantry, blocky and imposing and more like the chantries of Tevinter than the ones of the land of the White Divine. She'd... yes. She remembered caching her weapons and supplies in the forest and dressing in the nondescript livery she'd carried in her pack to pass for a servant: no one asked many questions if you kept your head down, said _yes serah, no your lordship, begging your pardon ser_ and looked like you knew what you were doing.

The Conclave had been due to start five days after she arrived. She remembered the first couple of days in Haven, mages and templars and Chantry bureaucrats mingling about as well as territorial cats. But after that?

A handful of images. Someone asking her something important. A fight? Pain. Terror. Something -- several somethings -- with too many legs chasing her, and she was inclined to call that _demon_ , since blight take it the _People_ at least knew what happened when you pushed a mage beyond the limits of their control. A woman? A woman in the darkness, with one of those ridiculous Chantry hats. Trying to help. Trying to help _her_ , though why Kara should feel sure of that, she didn't know.

If she'd got mixed up in a fight involving mages, that'd explain why she didn't remember much. And the chains.

Pain flared in her hand. She breathed through it until it subsided again. Not a good sign, that kind of pain: she could feel her fingers, flex them; couldn't feel the oozing heat of infection. But she needed to see it for herself.

Sitting up and opening her eyes brought her surroundings into clearer view. _Oh. That's a bad sign._ There were two guards _inside_ the cell, torchlight from four filled sconces reflecting from the polished fittings of their armour where they flanked the door. One -- a woman, her eyes onyx-cold beneath her helm -- said, matter-of-fact: "She's awake. Tell the boss."

An acknowledging grunt and heavy footsteps sounded from beyond the barred grill that interrupted the door's heavy wood. Kara eyed her guardians, not sure whether their impassive watchfulness was a good thing or a truly disturbing one. She'd been in cells before. More often than she'd like, since she was Istimaethoriel's preferred choice when the Keeper needed someone more replaceable than herself or her First to negotiate with humans, and _that_ had gone wrong more than once. It was deeply unusual to find a guard who _wouldn't_ take the opportunity to put the boot in to a bound prisoner, and doubly so for a prisoner who was also an elf and a Dalish savage.

The pain crested again. Her hand.

It was _green._

" _Blighted shit!_ "

Green and _bright_ , a light that coiled around her palm like a brand. Her fetters were iron, the metal on the inside of the shackles not filed to smoothness. Stocks, in fact, a solid bar keeping her wrists a yard apart. Distantly, she realised she couldn't have been wearing them for very long -- while the chafe had raised a couple of sores they hadn't started bleeding yet -- but most of her attention was taken up with dealing with her sudden urgent panic. She wanted to tear her hand off with her _teeth_ , because _that wasn't good_. She wasn't a mage, but that green shade _stank_ of the Beyond, and the gnawing pain snaking tendrils up her arm told her it wasn't doing anything good for her.

"What the blighted fuck _is_ this?" Breathing heavy, glaring at the guards. They, predictably, didn't answer. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, mastered herself. Counted the constellations in her head. Probably they knew no more than she did. They were soldiers, not mages. Even if someone had done this to her on purpose, they might not know anything of it. _Ask them something they might know the answer to_ , she told herself fiercely. _Ask them for something you can use_. Kara inhaled. "Forgive me, sers." _Make yourself humble_. She'd learned how in Tevinter, with all her _elvhen_ pride beaten out of her to pool in blood and vomit, and if she didn't like remembering, she had the cold benefit of knowing the _shem'len_ far more intimately than most of the People could ever claim. "May I have some water, please?"

The woman shrugged. "Don't see why not."

"Rylen," the human man said, warningly.

"Shut it," Rylen said, without heat. She unhooked a flask from her belt, weighed it in her hand, and eyed Kara consideringly. "Don't try anything, elf, got it?"

"Got it." Hampered by her bonds, Kara caught the tossed flask awkwardly, but she caught it. She had to use her teeth to unplug the stopper, but the water felt like a blessing on her tongue.

"Here." A small leather pouch smacked into Kara's chest. She flinched, but nothing else followed, and when she glanced up, Rylen's expression was a little less hard. "Ye've been out for three days. Eat summat before ye faint away again, or ye'll be no use to them as want ye able t'talk, aye?"

And _that_ wasn't ominous. Kara swallowed. "Thank you."

" _Rylen_."

"Shut it, I said."

The pouch, upon investigation, proved to contain jerked meat. Kara chewed and drank by turns, made graceless by the shackles, and tried to ignore the occasional flares of light and pain in her left hand. Whatever the blighted thing was, it hadn't killed her yet, and she needed to eat. Whatever happened, she'd need strength to face it.

When she was done, she raised her eyebrows at her unexpected benefactor and indicated pouch and flask. "Should I give these back to you?"

"Put 'em down in the middle of the room and then go face the wall."

Ah. They were treating her as someone _very_ dangerous, then. Kara fought her fear down and obeyed. Small noises told her when the items were collected, and a few moments later Rylen's voice said gruffly, "Ye can turn again now."

Shortly after that, the guard inside Kara's cell doubled. The new pair had crossbows, and held them on her while Rylen and her nervous partner shackled Kara's ankles and fixed the chain to a bolt in the stone floor. Kara submitted without speech or protest, and sat pliant after: this was neither place nor time for pride.

She had her honour. _That_ she would not compromise again, not after Tevinter. She would make no promise she could not keep, and tell no lie. She would not betray herself a second time. If she had to die here she would do it as herself, on her feet or as close to them as she could get.

But honour wasn't pride.

Footsteps beyond the door. It clanked open, grating, the same instant the mark on her hand flared again. In the wash of light it took her a moment to realise that the soldiers had stiffened to attention, that the two newcomers -- both women -- whose boots scuffed on the cold slate floor were here for _her_ , and not merely some change of the guard.

One dark and broad of shoulder, all angry intensity and leashed violence, her hand white-fisted around the hilt of her sword like a talisman. _Disciplined,_ Kara thought, but on the ragged edge of it; and _direct_ , and did not flinch when the dark one circled into her blindspot. That one might beat her, might draw her sword and strike her down, but Kara had lived with that risk long enough that it only took a breath to steady her fear.

The other one, now, the slender one whose hood failed to conceal her bright red hair, whose eyes were cold and considering in the mask of her face -- _that_ one looked at Kara as a clockmaker looked at a mechanism, assessing how best to take it apart.

Kara had seen that look on other faces. If she still prayed, she would have prayed to the Creators then. She breathed evenly, tried to keep her apprehension from her expression. _I am a woman of the People, and a warrior, and I will not let them see me flinch._

Hot breath on her ear. The dark-haired woman: "Tell me why we shouldn't kill you now?" A Nevarran accent to the common tongue. "The Conclave is destroyed."

Kara jerked in her bonds. _Destroyed?_

The dark-haired woman stalked in front of her, hardly seeming to notice Kara's disbelieving stare. "Everyone who attended is dead. _Except for you._ "

It could not be -- and yet -- "You think I'm _responsible_?"

A crushing grip on her wrist, a hard yank: Kara felt blood start where the shackle's edge sawed against a sore. "Explain this!" the dark-haired woman demanded, harsh as a crow -- so close Kara could smell old sweat from her gambeson, and the tang of woodsmoke that clung to her hair.

Green light flared. Pain shot from her fingers to her shoulder. Her interrogator flung her wrist down and stepped back, glaring.

"I wish I bloody _could_ ," Kara snarled -- let herself snarl, let them see her pain and frustration and sheer blighted _disbelief._ "Is it some kind of _shem'len_ magic? Did your people do this to me? _I don't know what that is._ "

A hand in her hair, dragging her head back: the point of a dagger pricking the vulnerable hollow of her throat. Sour-breath, scarred jaw, too much white showing in eyes whose corners showed the creases of too much sunlight and too many worries. "You're _lying_."


	2. Chapter Two: through darkness to the twilight air

Humans. This was what came of dealing with humans. They'd blame her because she was there, and an elf, and _convenient_. _I'm sorry, Thoriel. I failed the clan. I failed you._ "So do it, then, if you mean to." Kara made herself hold the other woman's glance, steadily. Made her voice level. "Kill me, since you're so sure whatever happened to your Conclave is the _elf's_ fault."

The red-haired woman yanked the dagger from the dark one's hand, pushed her back -- "We _need her_ , Cassandra!" -- and Kara rocked forwards onto her knees, enough control left not to gasp her relief, but barely: she'd expected to be choking out her last around an open windpipe, or feeling the hot rush of blood pump wetly from the big veins in her throat.

"Whatever happened to your Conclave is none of my doing." She wanted to touch her throat, make sure it was still whole. She shook her head instead. "I cannot _remember_ what happened, but that? That is beyond anything any of the People could do -- or would." _We remember the Dales_ , she didn't add. _We tell our children how we fought, and how we_ died _, the last time any of us challenged the Chantry._

"What _do_ you remember?" The red-haired one, her tone intent but not threatening. A good sign; a better sign, the fact she kept a restraining hand on her companion's -- _Cassandra, she called her Cassandra_ \-- on _Cassandra's_ arm.

Kara rolled one shoulder, half a shrug. "A fight? I was running. _Things_ were chasing me. A woman?" The images receded the more she reached for them, shattered splinters that made no clear picture. "She reached out to me -- she was trying to help me? I don't know. It's all... confused. None of this makes _sense._ " She raised her shackled hands and flexed the left one, demonstratively. "Especially not this. This scares the shit out of me more than either of you do, frankly. At least I _understand_ what you can do to me, if you decide you want to -- the whole torture, maiming, death thing, that's not _magic shit_."

The two human women exchanged a long glance. The dark one -- Cassandra -- said, "It's all right, Leliana. Go to the forward camp. I will take her to the rift."

" _Try_ not to lose your temper before we learn if Solas's notion holds true?"

The red-haired one left, taking with her all the guards bar one. In her wake Kara watched the passage of expressions over Cassandra's face -- like driven clouds on a windswept day, affection and grief and anger and hope finally settling into shuttered, scowling determination. "Key," she demanded of the last soldier, curt, and bent to unlock the shackles at Kara's feet. This close, from this angle, Kara could see her short feathery black hair had streaks of grey behind the ears.

_They need me for something. But what?_ "What actually _happened_?" she asked, not expecting an answer. Surprised when it came.

"It will be easier to show you." Then, even more surprising: unlocking the stocks that spread Kara's wrists in uncomfortable pinion. A moment's respite -- Kara made herself kneel patient: there were two of them still and she would never make the door -- before Cassandra brought a length of hempen cord from her belt and, with a wary glance to Kara's face, looped it briskly and securely round her wrists. Against her will, Kara swallowed a chuckle. So many bonds, and where, after all, could she run? Not once she recognised the woman in front of her, anyway, from a glimpse pointed out through Haven's crowd. Cassandra Pentaghast, Hero of Orlais, the White Divine's Right Hand.

The huff of her breath must have made the other woman imagine some mockery, because Cassandra yanked the final knot viciously tight and eyed her, sharp-edged temper close to the surface, and hauled her ungently to her feet. "Have you something to _add_?"

"When you went to tie my hands," Kara said -- because why not? What could her humour cost her now that she wouldn't lose anyway? -- "you looked like you expected me to attack you. But if I meant to, I should've struck as soon as I had even one hand free." She smiled, thin-lipped, and lifted her bound wrists. "It would have given me half a heartbeat longer before you struck me down. I'm not _utterly_ stupid: even among the Dalish some of us have heard of the Right Hand of the Divine."

Cassandra growled deep in her throat. Jerked the rope, so that Kara had to stagger forward or fall. "See that you come _quietly_ , then, prisoner."

_I have a name._ "Kara," she said, to the other woman's back -- the last of the soldiers a rearguard behind her -- as she followed her up a narrow stone stair and into the lamplight dimness of a chantry nave. It suddenly seemed important that the human should acknowledge that. "My name is Kara."

That earned her a grunt. Kara shrugged to herself, not really having expected more, and shivered in the sudden chill as Cassandra tugged her out through the chantry doors. After so long in dimness the light blinded her: her eyes watered, and it took a long moment before she could blink to clear them, before she realised the light was _wrong._

Green-tinged, sick like the light in her hand, flaring and crawling under her skin. Only this light flared and crawled in the _sky_ , a chasm, a wrongness, coiling fingers through the clouds and reaching down to earth. Like a cyclone, if a cyclone leaked green lightning and made her nerves hackle like the memory of a nightmare. A small voice inside her gibbered _run get away run now go --_

"We call it the Breach," Cassandra said, with audible emphasis, watching her intently. "It is a massive rift into the Fade that grows larger with each passing hour. It is not the only such rift. Just the largest. Demons come from all of them. All were caused by the explosion at the Conclave."

"Shit," Kara said, weakly. "An explosion can _do_ that?"

It was too much. Too wrong. How the blighted _fuck_ could she be standing here, with a green-blighted mark on her hand to match the green-blighted _hole in the bloody sky_?

But the frosty air smelled of snowmelt, mud, smoke and wet dog, and cut through her tunic to raise goosebumps on the skin beneath. And her bruises hurt too much for it to be a nightmare. The dormant ache of older wounds woke and sharpened in the cold. No. It was real.

"This one did," Cassandra said, level. Her certainty was calming, in a way. _She_ was real, and solid, and standing in front of Kara. _And she'll kill me if I look at her wrong. Remember that, Kara. Concentrate on not dying. Focus, right?_ "Unless we act, the Breach may grow until it swallows the world."

Light flared in the sky. Matching light flared in Kara's hand. The pain --

It was worse, as though the stone confines of her cell had been protection and exposure to the sky stripped every trace away. It twisted like knives in her veins, burned like hot irons -- so fierce she could almost smell the cooked-meat odour of her own burnt flesh, as though the old nightmare that drove her to sleep as far from the cookfires as she could had chased her down under the light of day and held her while the Tevinters branded her a second time.

She couldn't keep her feet, couldn't choke her moan in her throat. All she could do was kneel in the snow and curl around her arm and hope it would _end_.

Heartbeats that felt like lifetimes later, it dulled to a more tolerable agony. Kara exhaled, but her relief died as Cassandra dropped to one knee an arm's length in front of her. "Each time," the Divine's Right Hand said, fierce and intent, "Each time the Breach expands, your mark spreads. And it is killing you. That connection is why Sol -- why we think it may be the key to stopping this. But there isn't much _time_."

Kara jerked her chin at the sky. "How in _creation_ do you stop something like _that_?"

"We close the Breach," Cassandra said, calm as though she were discussing the price of ale in Antiva and not the end of the world, "Or try. Whether closing it is possible is something we shall discover shortly. It is our only chance, however." A muscle jumped in her scarred cheek, the only hint that her composure might be forced. "And yours."

Kara shook her head, instinctive negation. "No. I don't..."

First, the survival of the People. Then the survival of the clan. Only then could one of the _true_ People afford to think of themselves. Only then _would_ they think of their own survival, if they had any honour at all.

This... this was the end of the bloody world.

Calm descended on her with that thought, and clarity. Strangeness couldn't matter. Fear couldn't matter. She knew where her honour lay, now, and with it her duty, and fear was a small thing beside that.

"It doesn't matter about me," she said, and met Cassandra's startled glance with a rueful grin. "I don't care if you think I did this. I'm your only suspect, I get it. And I'm an elf and a Dalish, and that's not in my favour either, is it? But right now I don't even care if you kill me for lack of anyone else to blame. In the face of that?" She jerked her head at the sky without looking up, still holding Cassandra's gaze. "It doesn't _matter_. I'll do what I can. Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs. However it ends. Lead and I'll follow, Right Hand."

Cassandra snorted, a dubious sound. Hauled Kara to her feet with a fist in her collar, kept it there. "Seeker," she said, the word hanging half-reluctant in the air between them, and shoved Kara towards the steps that led down into the village proper.

"Seeker?" Kara didn't resent Cassandra's brutal efficiency. The other woman's grip felt as much shield as restraint, as they passed a huddled knot of townsfolk working on the axle of a cart, for the stares that followed them made Kara acutely aware that the humans blamed her for their disaster. Unless she missed her guess, only Cassandra's obvious gaoler's grasp stood between her and the violence of the mob.

"I am a Seeker of Truth, as well as Most Holy's Right Hand. I am _appropriately_ addressed as Seeker, or Seeker Pentaghast."

"Seeker, then." Kara's tunic and trews offered scant protection against the cold. She tested the give in her bonds, not-quite-idle curiosity, and tried not to shiver. "Is that a Chantry title?"

"Of a kind." The road out of Haven opened into a square before the broad gate. A small crowd gathered around the statue of Andraste at its centre, where a robed chantry mother was singing something from the Chant -- _field and forest shall burn, the seas shall rise and devour them_ \--

The chantry mother saw them, and startled into silence. Kara felt Cassandra's tension redouble as the crowd turned to stare.

"Murderer!" The rock hit Kara between the shoulders, bruisingly hard. She couldn't hide her stagger. "Knife-ear _murderer_!"

"Enough!" Cassandra's glare didn't silence the muttering crowd, but it might have cowed it a little. "This woman is a prisoner, and in my charge until her guilt can be determined. Go on about your business and leave me to mine!"

There were no more rocks and only a few more insults as Cassandra propelled Kara past the crowd. People were scarcer out of the town proper and on the path through the muddy rows of tents and pavilions that had sheltered the small army of pilgrims and profiteers, servants and victualers and emissaries come too late to the Divine's gathering to acquire rooms under a solid roof. In the distance, Kara could see streaks in the sky, where ... _things?_...were falling from that green gaping wrongness. The distant shouting was clearer now, accompanied by the faint ring of steel. Fighting. The breeze picked up. She found herself grateful for the bulwark of the other woman -- she was a windbreak, if nothing else, and her grip was at least warmer than the air. _You'll not get far, if you make a break for it. Not dressed as you are in this weather._ She grimaced. "Thanks for not letting them tear me apart in the street."

"They have decided your guilt. They need it." Cassandra's shrug rubbed her pauldron against Kara's near shoulder. "The people of Haven mourn our Most Holy Divine Justinia." The crack of grief in her voice, swallowed down and suppressed. "The Conclave was hers. It was a chance for _peace_ between mages and templars. She brought their leaders together. Now they are dead."

Unspoken, behind her words: _So is the chance for peace._

Kara grimaced. _If I could only bloody_ remember _what happened..._


	3. Chapter Three: And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh

The track they were on led past a watchtower that guarded a bridge. The soldiers stationed there saluted Cassandra, and one -- older than the rest, weathered face drawn with worry -- said: "They're holding the valley, Seeker, but we're starting to get reports the demons are spreading. Any new orders?" And froze as he noticed Kara in Cassandra's shadow. "Is that the _survivor?_ By the Maker, Seeker, you don't want to be alone with a murderer at your back on the road now!"

Cassandra stopped, scowling, and brought Kara to a halt with her. "I know you are afraid, " the Right Hand said, and Kara saw the honesty in her tone hit the listening soldiers like an icy blast. " _I_ am afraid. This is a new thing we face, and we lash out, like the sky. But we must think beyond ourselves, as Most Holy did, until the Breach is sealed. This woman may be a murderer. She may not be. Either way, we need her now. It is _my_ task to take her to the Breach. It is yours to stay here, stay alert, and protect the path to Haven. Whatever happens, I know you will not let us down. Trust _me_ not to let _you_ down: if the prisoner is responsible for what happened here, she _will_ answer for it. But now is not the time."

Kara buried her unwilling admiration for how well the other woman stiffened the soldiers' resolve with sincerity, and held her tongue until they had left the bridge behind for a path that followed the curve of the mountainside. "You know," she said -- her teeth did not chatter, she was _not cold, dammit_ , just a little chilly -- "since everyone else is dead, there's no way to prove I _wasn't_ responsible. You may as well stop pretending it matters."

"It is not pretence," Cassandra said -- with a damnable earnestness that made Kara want to believe her. There was something about the other woman that made her think _honourable_ and _honest_ and all the other words that a lifetime had taught her rarely applied when it came to a human dealing with the _elvhen_. "There will be a trial. I can promise no more." She sounded regretful, as though she wanted to promise more. As though she wanted to promise Kara a _fair_ trial. _You're reading too much into it, fool._ The Right Hand jerked her head. "Come. It is not far."

Far enough, with bound hands and no cloak to ward off the chill. Kara set her teeth and let Cassandra hurry her on.

The sky did its green flaring thing again. She sprawled in the muddy slush when her knees crumpled under her, the pain too fierce -- this second time no easier to bear than the first, except if it had ended once, it would _end again._

 _Breathe into it. Breathe._ Cassandra crouched in front of her, something akin to concern on the harsh planes of her features. "The pulses are coming faster now," the Right Hand said. This time she didn't haul Kara to her feet, but steadied her there, almost gentle. "Can you run? The larger the Breach grows, the more rifts appear." Her eyebrows drew down, grim. "And the more demons we face."

"I can run." If Rylen hadn't fed and watered her, back in the cell, it might be a different answer. _Small mercies_. "But I'll make better time if my hands are free." Kara held out her wrists and met Cassandra's forbidding gaze steadily. "I give you my word, if it makes any difference. I won't flee and I won't raise a hand or a weapon against you, or anyone with you."

Cassandra made a disgusted sound in her throat. Kara braced for a blow, or the expected insult -- few humans would accept an elf's word -- but the Right Hand offered neither. Her jaw tightened, but when she slid a well-used dagger from a sheath on her belt, it was to cut Kara's bonds and no more. She didn't even seem to notice Kara's incredulity. "Keep moving, then."

The path sloped upward, but not steeply. Careful of the icy footing, Kara pushed herself into an easy run, feeling warmth return to her muscles as her stride lengthened. Even in these conditions, she could maintain this pace for miles. With her hands free, she could _move_ , and though her wrists ached and the chill air burned in her throat and the sky was wrong and broken and green, it was _good_ to be moving and alive.

Which spurred a thought. "How the blighted shit did I survive the explosion, anyway?"

Cassandra's armour creaked and jingled. The other woman paced her easily despite its extra weight. "I was not there. But they say you stepped out of a rift and fell unconscious. They say a woman was in the rift behind you, though no one knows she was." Their strides fell nearly in tandem, save where the path grew treacherous underfoot. "Everything farther in the valley was laid waste, including the Temple of Sacred Ashes."

"Even the Temple?" It had been enormous, solid. Fortress-like, built to withstand ages. And home to the Chantry's most prized relics: even she knew that. "You mean _everything_?"

"I suppose you'll see soon enough."

Resignation in the words, and Kara fell silent. The other woman's grief was raw and plain, and would not thank her for intruding.

Another bridge, its far end boasting a pair of sentries. Cassandra touched her shoulder to slow her as they crossed onto its span: "Let me --"

Kara would never know how that sentence would have ended. The world exploded in green light and choking dust and jarring, dizzying motion. The bridge dropped out from beneath her. She fell, chin tucked, rolling, feeling displaced stone roll with and underneath her, elbows bruised and shoulders bruised and ribs bruised _again_ , landing sprawled and breathless on the hard ice of a deep-frozen river. _On your_ feet, _fool! Now!_ Scrambled upright, alert -- something had _made_ the bridge collapse, and Kara had been listening when Cassandra spoke of _demons._

"Seeker! You still alive?"

Where was the woman? Kara had no allies, and demons were _everyone's_ enemy, when they came confused and angry and full of hunger out of the Beyond into the waking world. Better to be beside a human warrior than alone.

Cassandra -- there she was, rolling to her feet, shield unshipped from her shoulder and a bloody cut opened above one eye. The soldiers hadn't been as lucky.

"Alive," the Right Hand confirmed. "And unharmed. You?"

"Nothing broken. But I think --" Green fire lanced from the sky, splashing heatless but with boot-shaking impact on the river-ice. The air crackled and something began to form, a shape that spoke of hunger and violence and shadow "-- we might have a problem."

"Stay behind me!" Cassandra, sword already in hand, ran to meet the threat. Kara swore viciously, violently -- _elvhen_ curses and Tevinter ones and one or two from Orlais when the common tongue ran dry -- and cast about for a weapon. She would _not_ be unarmed if blighted bloody _demons_ were falling from the blighted bloody _sky_ \--

She glimpsed motion and dodged left. The claw missed her scalp by a hair's breadth, and the demon -- it just fucking _coalesced_ from the air like mist turned solid, a thing with too-long arms and too many claws and joints in all the wrong places, and that was as bloody _wrong_ as the hole in the sky -- stalked after her in a smooth and terrifying glide.

There! A swordhilt jutted out under the half-pinned body of one of the soldiers. She dived for it -- had a moment to think _I fucking hope it's not stuck or warped or broken_ as her grip closed around the pommel _\--_

It slid free as though it had been waiting for her hand. She rolled and twisted, scrambling to her feet to meet the demon's _next_ attack with steel. It bled, and Kara grinned savagely as she ducked a whirling claw. Anything that _bled_ could be killed, and she weighed her weapon's balance and went on the attack.

It was aggressive but not clever. She'd heard that the lesser spirits, if they came through the Veil, were stupid. They were hungry and angry and found the waking world painful and confusing, and so attacked anything that moved within their reach. _Stupid_ was accurate, in this one's case. She took a thin scratch where she skidded on the ice and misjudged the reach of one of its flailing arms, but its bones were slender, its hide tender as any new-hatched thing, and she bled it in small cuts with the dead soldier's sword until she could get inside the reach of its claws. Then she ran it through, and wrenched the blade back and forth in its chest for good measure.

It died with a sound that might have been bewilderment. She kicked its corpse -- half ash, already decaying -- free from her sword.

She was in time to watch Cassandra stagger the remaining demon with a blow of her shield -- the _crunch_ it made echoed from the mountainside -- and follow up with a wicked forehand cut that cleaved the thing nearly in two. _Shit. She's a bloody force of nature._

 _I would have absolutely no chance against her. Forty heartbeats, that's how long I'd last._ Aloud, she said, "I think that's the last of them here. It's over."

Cassandra's eyes were wide, angry. She levelled her blade at Kara. "Drop your weapon. Now."

 _Well, sod me._ Kara sighed. Let the sword drop to the ice, kicked it so it slid a few paces aside. Held up her empty hands, and made her voice as peaceable as she could. "All right." A woman with the fire of battle still in her face was not to be argued with -- not when she fought like that. "All right, Seeker. I gave you my word, remember? I won't run from you, and I won't fight you. But" -- and she couldn't help the edge that crept into her tone, any more than she could help the _stupid_ sense of disappointment: why had the woman taken her word if she so easily believed Kara would turn on her? -- "if we're going to meet more demons, it would _help_ if you trusted me not to stab you in the back while we're _fighting them!_ "

"Give me _one reason_ why I _should_ trust you!" The Right Hand's blade didn't waver. Grief and suspicion and resentful fury chased each other across her features. A battle, in the other woman's heart -- and no wonder, with the sky broken and raining demons and the foundations of her world vanished in explosive slaughter.

"I dropped the sword," Kara said, plainly. "You don't know me, and you don't know what my word is worth. But I said _to whatever end_ and I meant it. I'd just prefer the end to be a bit more useful than dying on some demon's claws before we can even _try_ to close that bloody hole in the sky!"

Cassandra made a disgusted noise. Not quite a sigh. "You're right." Her expression said: _But I do not have to like it._ She slid her weapon home at her hip. "I cannot protect you. And I cannot expect you to be defenceless." This time the noise was a sigh. "I should remember you came willingly."

Kara's left hand ached. She consciously avoided looking at it. Whatever it was, whatever its connection to the hole in the sky, it would kill her eventually. Nothing like that felt like it did could ever be healthful. She hadn't needed the Right Hand to tell her that. Much better to die on her feet, doing something. Doing _anything_. "That's right," she said, bleakly. "Willingly." No point in dwelling on that, though. She forced lightness into her tone as she bent to reclaim the dead soldier's sword: "And freezingly. Would it have killed your lot to spare me a cloak?"

Cassandra had the grace to look abashed.


	4. Chapter Four: the shrill, demented choirs

They liberated a cloak -- torn and a little bloodstained, but warm -- from the dead, and a belt and scabbard for Kara's weapon, and a spare knife. A shield would've been too much to ask for: the only buckler to survive above the rubble was cracked halfway through, and would be more dead weight than protection. Now that Cassandra had made the decision to trust her with weapons, she seemed to relax a little, even to the point of allowing Kara at her back.

They pressed on at a jog, Cassandra guiding them along the frozen river, up narrow tracks in the mountainside. There were other demons, after the first. Some of them spat fire, or lightning, in addition to the ever-present claws. At the other woman's instruction, Kara fell to fighting at Cassandra's swordhand, where the Right Hand could cover her unshielded flank. Cassandra fought with efficient competence, power without wasted motion. Kara held her own, by dint of sweat and striving and concentrated effort -- but it was Cassandra's fluent awareness of everything around her that kept them from collecting more than nicks and bruises, and Kara's acknowledgement of the sheer martial _gift_ the other woman possessed blossomed into a growing admiration. She might have spent the last three summers with one of the handful of Free Marcher mercenary companies that'd hire an elf, but no one she'd seen could hold a _candle_ to the Right Hand of the Divine.

"We're getting close," Cassandra said, as they mounted steps cut in a rockface to another level of the mountainside -- the pilgrims' path to the temple had clearly suffered damage. "There's a smaller rift before the valley that we've had to keep contained -- you can hear the fighting. I hope --"

The steps terminated in a flatter stretch of hillside path. A green-glowing jagged twist -- a smaller version of the gaping, seething _wrongness_ in the sky -- hung in the air fifty yards away. It seethed and pulsed, its sickly light illuminating a battlefield where a handful of people fought back-to-back against a roiling mass of demons. If this was _contained,_ Kara thought, it was a _contained_ that was about to be overrun.

"Stay with me!" Cassandra bit out, and increased her pace to an all-out run.

They hit the demons from the flank, meeting claws and fire with steel and swift violence. Kara couldn't match Cassandra's murderous efficiency, but she accounted for her share, despite the mounting ache in her limbs and the stinging agony in her left hand. The world narrowed to the roar of blood in her ears and the rasp of breath in her throat, the enemy in front of her and the heft of the weapon in her hands --

A staff knocked a demon back as it was about to spit fire at her face. Someone else cut it down. Kara found herself distracted by the tall bald elf who grabbed her left wrist and hauled her forward towards the rift. "Quickly," he panted, yanking her arm up into the tendrils of green light. "Before more come through!"

_The bloody blighted shit --?_

Light welled in her hand. Pain twisted. She felt _something_ drain from her, like blood from a wound, flowing out and up into the green emptiness in the air --

\-- which shrank to nothing and winked out like a candle.

Her knees gave way on sudden exhaustion. There was silence, broken only by a man's injured moaning and the still-distant clamour of more fighting. She stared at the grey-churned snow -- spattered with blood, melted in patches -- and waited for the wave of dizziness to subside.

The light wreathing her palm had returned to quiescence. Painless now, barely an ache. She eyed it mistrustfully, and used the point of her sword to lever herself back upright.

"Well done." The bald man carried himself like a Keeper, with the quiet assurance of unchallengeable authority, and a staff tucked between his body and the curve of his elbow. He had no _vallaslin_ , so he could not be a man of the Dalish, but he didn't hold himself like a man who'd ever learned to make himself small, as the elves of the cities did. He arched an eyebrow at her, apparently amused by her suspicious glare. "You closed it."

"What did you do?"

A trace of laughter on his classic _elvhen_ features, one that seeped into his voice. "I did nothing. The credit is yours." Among the People, he would be accounted beautiful. Kara found herself inclined to dislike him for it.

Apart from Bald-and-Beautiful, there were three soldiers left on their feet, and a dwarf with a crossbow the size of his torso slung over his shoulder who'd turned his back to scan the sightlines. Though Kara thought his indifference to the conversation more appearance than truth. Cassandra rose from where she'd been seeing to the wounded man -- a mercy stroke, with his guts a shredded mess in the snow. "Maker's breath! It worked, then, in truth?"

"Indeed." Baldie addressed the Right Hand respectfully, but without deference. "As I said before, whatever magic opened the Breach in the sky also placed the mark on her hand. It seems I was correct when I theorised it could be used to close the rifts that have opened in the Breach's wake."

"So." Cassandra, intent as a hunting hawk. "It could also close the Breach itself. That is correct, yes?"

" _Theoretically_ , Cassandra, I said before. It is still a theory. Admittedly now one with a little more support." The quirk of a smile in Kara's direction. "It seems you hold the key to our salvation."

"Great," Kara said dryly, and found the dwarf grinning at her when she turned away to hide her weariness from Baldie's too-knowing face.

"Good to know," he agreed, adjusting his gloves. "Here I thought we'd be ass-deep in demons forever." The suggestion of a bow. "Varric Tethras. Rogue, storyteller, occasionally unwelcome tagalong." He shot Cassandra a wink, and Kara was already sufficiently familiar with the Right Hand of the Divine to predict the disgusted breath that answered him.

"Kara." She didn't give her clan. Tethras. House Tethras owned half of the Free Marches. She'd argued with their factors on Thoriel's behalf more than once. She raised her eyebrows. "Unwelcome tagalong?"

The grin broadened. "Technically I'm a prisoner, just like you."

Cassandra scoffed. "I brought you here to tell your story to the Divine. Clearly that is no longer _possible_ , let alone necessary."

And that was a history Kara didn't think she had time to question. The wind picked up, and she shivered under her cloak.

"Yet here I am." Varric patted the stock of his crossbow. "Lucky for you, considering current events. We should get moving, Seeker. The valley isn't getting any _less_ demon-infested."

"You should return to Haven, Varric. Your help is appreciated, but --"

"Have you _been_ in the valley lately, Seeker?" Some of the humour faded from his expression. "Your soldiers aren't in control anymore. You _need_ me. You need all the help you can get."

Cassandra's disgusted exhalation was a surrender, of its kind. "Very well. Let us move."

"My name is Solas, if there are to be introductions," Baldie said, as Cassandra sent the trio of soldiers on ahead with a few brusque orders, and lead them on at a swift walk. "I am pleased to see you still live."

 _Solas._ What kind of asshole called himself _Pride_?

"He means," Varric interjected, interrupting her thought, "'I kept that mark from killing you while you slept.'"

 _Great._ It was petty, to resent owing the too-pretty too-knowing elf a debt, but Kara couldn't help it. She resolved to save _his_ life at the earliest possible opportunity. "Thank you." She lengthened her stride to put herself at Cassandra's swordarm again, since the noise of fighting grew louder. Over her shoulder: "You seem to know a great deal about all this."

Cassandra scoffed. "Solas is an apostate." The implication: _He knows a great deal that decent people shouldn't._

"Technically, all mages are now apostates, Cassandra." Unoffended, and without significant strain in his voice as they scrambled up another steep curve of the path. "My travels have allowed me to learn much of the Fade. Far beyond the experience of any Circle mage. I will offer whatever help I can give with the Breach. If it is not closed, we are all doomed, regardless of origin."

"Commendable," Kara said, dry, and couldn't help but wonder what his angle _really_ was.

"Merely sensible. Although sense appears to be in short supply right now." He caught up with them where the path widened, and paced Cassandra at her shield-side. "Cassandra, you should know the magic involved here is unlike any I have ever seen. Your prisoner --" a quirked smile to Kara, half-sympathetic "-- is no mage. Indeed, I find it difficult to imagine any mage having such power. The forces at work here..." He trailed off. "I cannot say what might happen."

"Understood." Grimly, Cassandra picked up the pace. "We must get to the forward camp quickly, then."

"Well," Varric huffed, some yards behind them, " _Bianca's_ excited."

"His crossbow," Cassandra said to Kara's baffled glance. "He calls it Bianca. Do not ask."

The soldiers broke trail, sending back warnings when a knot of demons blocked the path. With seven of them, the going was faster and the demons died easier, though they lost one of the soldiers when she slipped on an icy patch and skidded right under a demon's claws.

"So," Varric said, when they reached yet another set of stairs set into the mountain rock -- the last stretch, Cassandra claimed, before the forward camp. " _Are_ you innocent?"

Was she? Kara grimaced. She couldn't think of anything that would induce her to knowingly participate in such indiscriminate murder. Oh, she had cause to hate humans, some of them, but the White Divine had been a moderate of her kind, a restraining influence. And yet she could not remember. Had she been part of... whatever caused this? The mark on her hand seemed to argue _yes_ , even if every other part of her cried out against it. "I can't swear to it." The steps steepened, worse luck: if she survived the day, she'd hurt even worse tomorrow. "I can't remember."

Varric's chuckle echoed up from the rocks. "That'll get you every time. Should've spun a story."

Kara found anger on her tongue, fierce and hot. But her "My word is all I can call my _own_ , Tethras," was lost under Cassandra's louder disapproving: "That's what _you_ would have done."

"It's more believable and less prone to result in premature execution," Varric agreed cheerfully.

They came onto the flat again. A watchtower and half a tumbled fort guarded another bridge some two hundred yards distant, tattered banners flapping in the rising wind. Cassandra made her habitual disgusted noise, and sighed. "I hope Leliana made it through."

Leliana. The cold terrifying one from the cell. "We'll see for ourselves soon enough," Solas said. "There it is."


	5. Chapter Five: what light said about a stone

There it was.

Kara bit her lip as the pair of soldiers in the lead hailed a sentry picket, and came to a decision that made her hands shake. "Seeker." She unbuckled her borrowed swordbelt, wrapped the leather tails around the scabbards of her scavenged sword and knife, and held the bundle out to Cassandra before she could change her mind. "You'd better take these, now we're back among your people." She managed a crooked grin. "I'm still your prisoner, after all, and I'd hate to die because someone didn't realise we're all on the same side as far as the demons are concerned."

Respect chased surprise across Cassandra's features. "Very well." She accepted Kara's weapons with a grimace, threading the bundle through the straps of her shield and slinging it over her shoulder. "You are likely right to be concerned. So far you have behaved with honour. It would be poor repayment to let some frightened fool strike you down."

"Glad we're on the same page," Kara said, and felt her spirits lift a little at Cassandra's snort.

The sentries passed them through the fort's barred gates, and Cassandra's mere presence cleared a path through the huddles of troops collected around braziers, tending weapons or food, bandaging injured comrades or sitting against a wall to snatch what rest they could.

Voices raised in argument reached them as Cassandra led them onto the stones of the bridge. The cold woman from the cell -- Leliana -- faced a red-faced man in Chantry robes across a makeshift table, and as they approached Kara could hear the strain in his half-shouted insistence. "-- exercise in _futility!_ You, Cassandra, haven't you all done enough already? Fall back, before more lives are lost to this madness!"

"Stay with me," Cassandra said to Kara, quietly, and then with repressive emphasis: "Chancellor Roderick!"

"Here they come," sighed the angry Chantry brother, and crossed his arms as Cassandra came to a halt -- parade rest, military precision -- in front of the table.

"You made it." Leliana's gaze took in Kara's unbound hands with no evidence of disapproval and passed on to Cassandra. Her expression was far harder to read than the Right Hand's, but her shoulders lost some of their tension -- relief, Kara thought, at seeing her colleague alive and whole. "Cassandra --"

Brother Angry's glance flicked from Cassandra to Kara, and noticed what Leliana had. His face went from red to purple, and he jabbed a finger at Kara's eye. "As Grand Chancellor of the Chantry, I hereby order you to take this criminal to Val Royeaux to await execution!"

"Order _me_?" Cassandra hackled like an offended cat. "You are a glorified clerk! A bureaucrat!"

Leliana caught Kara's glance, and gave a slight, long-suffering quirk of her mouth. The terrifying woman had a sense of humour. That made her almost more frightening.

"And you are a thug, but a thug who supposedly serves the Chantry!"

"We serve the Most Holy, Chancellor." Leliana, cold as the mountain wind, all humour vanished. She eyed him like a blackbird eyes a worm. "As you well know."

He threw up his hands. "Justinia is dead! We must elect a replacement and obey _her_ orders! Sister Nightingale, Seeker Pentaghast, see reason! We must retreat."

"Great," Kara muttered under her breath. "No one's in charge."

"No one asked _you_ to speak, elf! You brought this on us in the first place!"

Kara met his glare evenly. "It seems to me my guilt or innocence is less important that closing the bloody great hole in the _sky_ , Chancellor."

He would hit her now. She saw it in his face. But before he could, Cassandra stepped in front of Kara and caught the chancellor's haymaker of a punch on her vambrace. "Chancellor, enough!"

"Call a retreat, Seeker." The fight sagged from his shoulders, revealing a man in despair. "Our position here is hopeless."

"I believe we can stop this before it's too late." Cassandra stared him down. "If we can get to the Temple, reach the Breach, we might yet triumph."

"Even with all your soldiers, you won't survive long enough to get to the Temple. Look out there, Seeker! The valley is teeming with demons."

"If our forces charge as a distraction, we might make it via the mountain path," Leliana said, thoughtfully.

"We lost contact with an entire squad on that path." Cassandra shook her head. "Better to cut straight through."

Kara stared up at the green hole in the sky. Such a blighted _mess._ And her right in the middle of it. _Thoriel, I wish I had time to write you and let you know what has happened. The People will need to be careful in the days to come._

"Listen to me," the chancellor said, desperately. "Abandon this now, before more lives are lost!"

The Breach convulsed. Green light flashed. The agony coiled in Kara's hand again. This time she was ready for it. This time she only staggered, instead of falling to her knees. But blighted _shit_ , the pain felt mortal.

Cassandra caught her, held her up. "We must go soon, either way." A softening of her scowling sternness. "It is your mark we must get to the Breach. Which way would you choose?"

Kara set her teeth against the agony. "You know I won't survive long enough for your trial, right? Though I appreciate that you promised me one instead of a lynching." She hissed as the mark gave a throbbing twist. "Take the straight path, Seeker. Cut me a way, and I will do everything I can. My word on it."

"Very well." Cassandra straightened. "Leliana. Bring everyone. We hold nothing back." She offered Kara back her weapons, darkness in her eyes. "You will likely need these."

"Lead and I'll follow, Seeker." Kara breathed through the pain as it subsided, and resettled the swordbelt around her hips. "To whatever end."

"On your head be the consequences, Seeker," the chancellor muttered as Cassandra led their small group away. A frightened man, and petulant with it. Kara grimaced. _If I live through today, Brother Angry is going to try to put me to death tomorrow._

Live through today first.

The battlefield was a nightmare, broken ground and broken bodies, burning embers and torn-apart barricades where defenders had had the breathing space to try to make a stand before being overrun. There were other troops in the valley, fighting their own holding actions against the demons that formed from rifts in the air and fell in glowing streaks from the sky. Cassandra formed their advance like the point of a spear, a shieldwall advancing under the cover of archers behind, but the only reason they could advance at all without being overrun was the mark on Kara's hand. When she held it up in the green light of the rifts, it drained her -- it _hurt_ \-- but the rifts shrank to nothingness and the demons could not regroup and come on them from behind.

Cassandra stayed at her left, and Solas and Varric covered her back. The dwarf was faster than he looked, and the mage as swift to use his staff as a club as he was deadly with his magic, but still. It was a nightmare to cover that ground, half slippery with ice and half on fire, the air cut with demonic shrieks, the ring of steel and the screams of the wounded. Stinking of blood and shit and the sulphur-copper reek the fire-spitting demons left in their wake. Kara pressed forward, all her sense narrowed to _keep going, keep fighting, keep on your feet_ \-- because if you slipped and someone couldn't haul you back upright you were lost.

The light of another rift winked out as she wobbled on her aching legs, and suddenly she was aware that the sounds of fighting had died. They stood in the shadow of a broken gatehouse, the stones twisted and deformed by some explosive force, and she hissed out an appalled breath. _The Right Hand wasn't joking about "laid waste."_

"You're growing quite proficient," Solas observed, and she held herself back from snarling _Proficient? It bloody well feels like I'm bleeding to death every time, you sodding wanker_ by sheer force of will.

Varric patted her steadyingly on the back. "Let's hope that hand trick works on the big one."

"Lady Cassandra!" A blood-spattered blond man emerged from behind a wall of fallen rubble, his voice ringing with relief. "You managed to close the rift. Well done."

Cassandra's disgusted noise had many shades. This one implied resignation, with a touch of exasperation. "Do not congratulate me, Commander." She gestured Kara forward. "This is our prisoner's doing."

"Is it?" He eyed her with suspicion, his mouth narrowing as he took in her weapons. "I hope Solas is right about you -- and Leliana is right about Solas, for that matter. We've lost a lot of people to get this far." He dismissed her with a shrug, and turned back to Cassandra. "The way to the Temple should be clear from here. Leliana's taken the scouts ahead. She'll meet you there."

"Then we'd best move quickly." Cassandra clasped the blond man's forearm. "Give us time, Commander. Make sure nothing takes us from behind."

"Maker watch over you, for all our sakes." He saluted and turned aside, gathering a handful of troops with a wave.

 _There's another one who doesn't like me very much._ Kara sighed, and tried not to sag with weariness. Some hint must have shown in her stance, because Cassandra was at her shoulder in an instant, eyes narrowed in concern. "Are you wounded?"

Kara shrugged. "Tired, that's all." She held up her marked hand. "Whatever this is, it doesn't just hurt. It's draining me somehow as well -- like blood from a wound, I would've said, but I'm not bleeding." Aware of the number of cuts and scratches she acquired, she amended that last: "Not much, anyway."

"Food might help," Varric suggested, before Cassandra could speak. He curled his lip at the Right Hand. "Or water. Did you remember to _feed_ your prisoner before you dragged her across a battlefield after three days on her sickbed, Seeker?"

"Maker's breath, Varric, I --" Cassandra flushed dark and cut herself off. She eyed Kara, almost hesitant. "Did you eat? I do not know what orders Leliana left -- they were her people on watch in your cell."

Kara choked on an inappropriate laugh. _Did I eat? Don't play the innocent, Cassandra, you were ready to break out the knives and hot irons._ "If one of the guards hadn't taken pity on me and spared me a little jerked meat, Seeker, the answer would be no. Whether that was orders or no, the fact is I've gone longer on less." She grimaced. The Right Hand might be her captor, but right now she was also her _commander_ , and on the battlefield owed the full truth. "Though I admit the way I'm feeling right now, I'm going to start slowing you down in earnest soon. I'm getting weaker and slower with every rift we meet. You need to be aware of that."

"Maker's breath." Cassandra pulled a small pouch from her belt. "I am a fool. Here."

Shards of hard biscuit, dense with nuts and honey and dried fruit. A rich woman's journey food, the kind a soldier would hoard for hard marches and long nights. Kara didn't realise how hungry she was until the taste hit her tongue and her stomach woke with a furious growl.

" _Told_ you, Seeker," Varric said, and didn't even earn himself a disgusted huff for it.

They pressed on into the blasted ruin where the Temple of Sacred Ashes had once stood. The food restored some of Kara's energy, so that she could focus on more than putting one foot in front of the other. It was a mixed blessing, for if the battlefield had been a nightmare, this was purer horror. Stone had melted and crumpled in unnatural shapes, flowing over and around the charred remains of what had once been people. Their footfalls _crunched_ underfoot, and drifts of ash rose with the choking, coughing miasma of burnt bone.

"This," Cassandra said -- more to break the silence, Kara thought, than out of any real wish for conversation -- "was where you walked out of the Fade and our soldiers found you." She indicated the twisted stump of something that might once have been a pillar.

"Lovely," Kara said, and coughed on the dust of the dead.

A handful of walls still stood, precariously leaning. They followed the ruins of a hallway further in, to where green light twisted and flared in the concave hollow of what had once been a complex of buildings. A rift spun lazily near ground level, thin jagged tendrils reaching from it up into the greater wrongness in the sky.

Varric gave voice to Kara's thought. "The Breach is a _long_ way up."

Kara's left arm ached to the shoulder. "Shit, Tethras. Don't start making jokes about my height _now._ "

A weak effort. It won a chuckle, but not from him. Leliana emerged from the shadows, motion where before there had only been stillness: a slender knifeblade of a woman with a quiver slung at her hip and the lethal elegance of a longbow in her grasp. Only now did Kara notice her armour was dragonscale, fitted to her like a second skin, a king's ransom worn with use and much repair. "You made it, thank the Maker." A glance to Cassandra. "My men are already in place, watching for demons." Back to Kara, her eyes all steady assessment. "Have we a plan?"

"I'm the prisoner, remember? Plans aren't my responsibility." Kara jerked her chin at the sky, trying not to feel hopeless. "I don't know if I can even reach that thing, much less close it. But I'll do my best."

Cassandra huffed. "Solas?"

"This rift was the first." The mage gestured with his staff at the green absence near the blasted ground. "It is likely the key. Seal it, and perhaps we seal the Breach."

"That's a pretty big _perhaps_ , Prideful," Kara bit out.

He shrugged, unruffled. "Life is itself uncertain. I can theorise, but until we make the attempt, none of us can foretell the outcome."

"Point." Kara sighed, and rolled her aching shoulder. "All right. Let's get on with this. Where's the way down?"


	6. Chapter Six: the spent sun reels and blunders

 

 

Cassandra led the way. Kara stayed at her swordarm, a pace behind. The oppressive atmosphere -- sick green light from the Breach and the rift meeting a faint red glow that hummed in the walls -- made Kara wish for armour, proper mail, even a leather hauberk: something solid to put between her and the blow that every instinct told her would be coming for her back.

 **NOW IS THE HOUR OF OUR VICTORY**.

The voice boomed from the stone. Kara ducked and flinched. She wasn't alone. Cassandra spun for cover, and Varric and Leliana shied backwards. Only Solas seemed unmoved.

**BRING FORTH THE SACRIFICE.**

"What are we hearing?" Cassandra demanded of the mage, before Kara could.

"At a guess?" His calm was infuriating. "The person who created the Breach."

" _How_? Are they here? Now?"

"I doubt it. The Fade holds echoes of past events, Seeker, you know this. The Veil here is not merely thin, but broken. Breached. The Fade bleeds into this place. It is likely that what we hear is one such an echo. "

Kara blew out a breath. She didn't recognise the voice. And -- "Well. At least it doesn't sound like _me_."

"Still creepy," Varric muttered. He eyed the rubble, where a red crystaline mineral glowed. "You realise that's red lyrium? What's it _doing_ here?"

"I see it, Varric." Cassandra's disapproving huff held worried overtones, this time. She jumped down the wreckage of a broken stone stairwell, and Kara followed. _There's a difference between red lyrium and the regular stuff?_ Clan Lavellan had little commerce with the dwarves of Orzammar, or the surface trade in minerals. Only a Keeper might occasionally have call for lyrium -- Kara's knowledge was limited to the fact it was addictive, dangerous, and sometimes necessary for magic.

Solas helped Varric down. "Magic could," he said musingly, "have drawn on lyrium below the Temple. Corrupted it somehow?"

"Yeah, maybe. Listen." Varric caught up to Kara's side, rapped her elbow. "Pay attention, Dalish. This stuff is _evil_. Whatever you do, don't touch it."

His expression was drawn, his eyes haunted. Kara swallowed. "How bad is it?"

"It sent the templar Knight-Commander of Kirkwall mad. Then turned her into a glowing _statue._ _That's_ how bad it is."

 _Pretty bad, then._ "Right." She forced humour into her voice. "No touching the red stuff. Being turned into a crazy statue really sounds like one of the few ways today could get even _worse_."

Varric chuckled. It sounded strained. "I like you, Dalish. I've missed being around someone with a sense of humour."

**KEEP THE SACRIFICE STILL.**

"That's not going to stop being disturbing," Kara observed, fighting to settle the hackles on her spine.

"It could be worse." Leliana, from behind --

_SOMEONE HELP ME!_

A woman, Orlesian and afraid. Someone whispered an Orlesian curse -- Leliana, at Kara's guess -- and Cassandra staggered as though from a blow _._ "That is Divine Justinia's voice!"

"And it got worse," Varric said, resigned. "No one _ever_ says 'It could be worse,' without something getting worse. Do you people not _know_ that?"

They were near the lower rift now. Kara's mark flared awake in green crawling pain. The voice came again, and Cassandra _growled_ in frustrated grieving rage.

"What's going on here?"

For a moment Kara thought the words had come from her own mouth. Then Cassandra seized her arm, shook her like a terrier with a hound, and she realised it had echoed like the other voices, the strange ones. "That was your voice! Most Holy called out to _you_ for help!"

Her eyes were the same as when she'd pressed a knife to Kara's throat, wide-wild, all furious suspicion tangled in a grief -- a _guilt_ \-- she couldn't fight. The expression of a woman who held herself responsible for not preventing a disaster she _knew_ she could not have stopped, and hated her grief and her helplessness in equal measure. Hearing the Divine's voice -- the Divine's cries for a help she was too late to give -- would be torture, and Kara's stomach twisted with unwilling sympathy even as Cassandra's grip tightened near to pain. "Seeker," she said, as evenly as she could, "I wish I could tell you what happened, but I don't remember. And the Beyond doesn't always reflect the truth."

"She's right, Cassandra." Solas stepped in front of the Right Hand, his calm like a wall. "The Fade is... changeable. We cannot know precisely what happened, or how."

Cassandra released Kara with a frustrated huff. "Maker's breath." Her glance was -- not apologetic, not quite. The glare she aimed at the rift could have seared steel.

_SOMEONE HELP ME!_

_What's going on here?_

The voices sounded again, a stuttering repeat. Shapes appeared in the air above the rift. The shadow of a woman. The looming outline of something dark.

 _RUN WHILE YOU CAN!_ echoed the Divine's strained tones. _WARN THEM!_

" _Solas_ ," Cassandra snarled, "Is this vision _real?_ "

**WE HAVE AN INTRUDER. SLAY THE ELF.**

That seemed a pretty solid argument that Kara hadn't been responsible for the slaughter. Even if the Chantry ended up blaming her for it anyway. Something lightened inside her: that was a guilt she didn't have to carry.

"It is the Fade, Cassandra. It is one view of what happened, certainly. The only one?" Solas shrugged, still impossibly calm. "It does seem to exonerate our survivor, however."

From the corner of her eye, Kara saw Leliana's expression tighten. "Enough of this," the slender woman said sharply. "We are wasting time. The Divine is _gone_ and the sky is broken. Interrogate Solas later, Cassandra. What must be done _now_?"

Kara held up her green flaring palm. It hurt, but the mark didn't seem to be interacting with this rift as it had with the others. "Well, I'm happy to take suggestions, since I have no idea how any of this even _works._ "

Cassandra glared at her, then at the rift. Her scowl changed to a worried frown. "This one is... not like the others."

"You are correct, Seeker." Solas brought his free hand up into the play of light. His voice was thoughtful, mild, at odds with the intensity of concentration in his expression. "This rift is not sealed, but it _is_ closed, albeit temporarily. I believe..." He did something, a white spark rolling between his fingers. "Yes. The rift can be opened, and then with the mark, sealed properly and safely, like the others. But opening the rift will likely attract attention from the other side."

"That means demons," Cassandra said grimly. "Leliana, signal your people. We must stand ready."

Leliana nodded, and blew a series of notes on a small horn -- Kara recognised the calls for _rally_ and _form on the standard_ , but the rest were unfamiliar. Armed men and women trickled out of the ruins and the rubble, gathering in loose formation, while a flurry of movement on the twisted heights revealed itself to be a party of archers. Cassandra caught Kara's eye. "We must keep you alive long enough to seal the rift." Her lips made a tight line, grim and purposeful. "I will guard your back. Are you ready?"

Kara hefted her drawn sword, flexed her marked and aching hand. She held Cassandra's gaze. She was going to die -- if closing the lesser rifts had drained her, sealing the Breach could only be far worse -- but that was a mercy, of a kind. She could die here, trying to fix the end of the world, and it would be a worthy death. Better than the death that awaited her if she survived, with Brother Angry and his ilk _needing_ a scapegoat, an appeasing sacrifice. "If this is where it ends, at least I can honestly say it's been an honour to fight at your side, Seeker." An ungrudged truth, though the Right Hand flushed at it. Kara blew out a breath, and grin. Better to go lightly, wholeheartedly, than to flinch and fail. "I'm ready. Let's do this."

Cassandra gave a sharp nod. "Solas?"

The mage took Kara's wrist, his long fingers cold and implacable. "This may hurt," he said, and then he did -- _something_ \-- and green fire burned through Kara's veins.

She was starting to grow used to the pain.

The air cracked. The rift lurched. There was a noise like the tolling of bell hammered out of true --

For an instant Kara did not understand the shape that had dropped from the rift. This was to other demons as a blight-twisted bear was to a weasel: vast by comparison, brutal, its footfalls shaking the ground. Cassandra yanked her out of the way of its descending fist, and then they were scrambling, sprinting, ducking breathless around jagged debris, trying to stay just one step ahead of the _monster._ It was less a _fight_ than a breakneck race to distract the demon-thing long enough for the archers to cripple it, for _someone_ to get close enough to do enough damage to slow it down, and Kara dared not take even a heartbeat to raise her mark to the rift and let the green agony in her palm have its way -- a moment's inattention would see her smeared across the stone. The difficulties only worsened when smaller demons began to form from the air in streaks of many-clawed light.

"Shit," she said, crouching beside Cassandra in the very temporary shelter of a lump of rubble -- she'd knocked the Right Hand sideways behind it when the Seeker had been occupied with two lesser demons and failed to noticed the giant claw that had swept for them both -- and tried to catch her breath. "How do we stop that thing?"

They were running again before she finished speaking, Cassandra hauling her up and onwards. "You are --" the Right Hand panted, "--lighter than I. If I made my shield a step, could you reach the back of its knee?"

Kara slashed at a lesser demon and rolled sideways as Cassandra smashed back another that went for their backs. "Shit, Seeker, if you can make the timing work I'll fucking _try!_ "

Then they were moving, Cassandra bellowing at Leliana across the battlefield, the words less sentences than the shorthand of comrades.

Cunning and co-operation from Leliana's scouts, a dazzling light display from Solas, and a torturous dash across broken ground got them into the demon-thing's blindspot. Fear was a cold wash in Kara's gut as Cassandra put on a burst of speed to draw ahead of her. In the shadow of the demon's giant leg the Right Hand dropped her sword and spun, putting her back to the threat, and went to one knee with her shield braced like a tray.

Sweat-streaked features hard as iron and grim with purpose. Kara got a foot on that metal ledge, _trusted_ and balanced as Cassandra rose with a shout of effort, propelling her to her target --

Her sword found bone, jarring resistance. The world heaved and she fell sprawling, her hand wrenched from the hilt. Cassandra was there, dragging her aside as the titan lurched -- absurdly, impossibly, at the same instant as a red-haired streak of motion raced up the demon-thing's staggered leg to plant a sword in its uninjured one and jump clear.

"Leliana!" Cassandra, disapproval and relief in her shout. Kara's knees buckled when she tried to stand. Leliana was at their side, taking some of Kara's weight, face flushed as they scrambled from the demon's howling reach.

"I _thought_ I could still manage that move!"

"You are impossible!" More relief than disapproval, Cassandra half-laughing through her scowl.

 _They're_ both _bloody forces of nature,_ Kara thought muzzily, and finally managed to get her legs working again.

With the giant demon no longer mobile, bellowing and lurching as it tried to crawl and the archers and scouts -- and Varric and Solas -- ripped pieces out of it, it finally became possible to get Kara within range of the rift. Cassandra supported her on one side, a handful of scouts surrounding them to keep the lesser demons at bay. "Do it!" the Right Hand demanded.

The tendrils of green light found the flaring green on her palm, and flashed to solar brightness. Agony welled, sharp as knives, hot as brands. _Dying_ , Kara thought, as her vision greyed at the edges, and clenched all her will around _holding on_.

 _Close, blight you. Close and I'll die_ willing _._

There was no breath in her lungs, no strength in her muscles. Nothing but the pain and a building pressure like the air before a storm.

 _Fucking_ close!

Thunder came then, and blackness, and all sense of self went away in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I did that thing. Rewrote THE WRATH OF HEAVEN to make myself happy. Happier.
> 
> Only time will tell whether or not I'm smart enough to leave the rest of the plot alone...


End file.
